After last weekend's blizzard, columnist is finally ready for spring

I love a blizzard. The sky roars like an approaching train in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and strong winds. Instead of fluffy snowflakes, ice crystals descend to the earth. The sleet feels like frozen sand against your face.

I like to go for a walk during a blizzard to see and feel how rough Mother Nature can be close up. In a mid-winter blizzard, temperatures plunge to arctic lows after a blizzard, but not during April. The 5-foot high drifts soon melt and spring returns.

There might be another beautiful blizzard this spring, but winter is on its way out. Drake mallards are chasing the females by the pumping house on Menominee Drive; you can hear the trilling of red-winged blackbirds in marshy areas; we have gained over four hours of daylight since the winter solstice and its ice-out on Lake Winnebago.

Soon there will be parades of ducklings heading to Millers Bay from our neighborhood, led by their proud and bossy mothers. There will also be new green blades of grass next to sunny walls and crappie fishermen lined up on the shore of Millers Bay.

We are uplifted by this period of newness. The first smell of newly cut grass, dandelions and the neighbors grilling chicken. I gather my seed catalogs, which arrived in December, and plot my garden, flower pots and hanging baskets. My vegetable garden will have tomatoes, bush cukes, lettuce, peppers, pole beans and herbs. They will join with the rhubarb, which spent the winter in the ground along with my roses. My roses where beautiful last year; I hope they survived the winter. Again, this year, my pots and hanging baskets will have geraniums, marigolds, snap-dragons and hanging vines. They, too, were beautiful.

Spring is the season of hope and of life. This spring, especially, fills me with the hope of good things happening; to be able to see again, after more than four years of blindness. Maybe my luck has not run out. Hope springs eternal.